Eye of the Needle
by nunwithachainsaw
Summary: Gorillanity ends in 1995 A.D. not with a bang but with a whimper—like a field of candles snuffed out all at once by a great invisible wind. As two of the last remaining apes in existence, Diddy and Dixie Kong must band together with the plague's other survivors and mount a heroic last stand against the Prince of Darkness.


**1**

Diddy Kong clapped his lighter shut and puffed a little smoke into his mouth. He didn't like it. No sir, not one bit. He squinted out over the cityscape that littered the twenty-some miles between his mother's high-rise apartment complex and the shore of Donkey Kong Island. Cars lay askew in the streets like tiny Legos spilled out of a great bucket. Corpses littered the sidewalks. Not _all_ the dead had died of plague—in that hot, bloody, final summer, the whole island had gone berserk as creatures of all species began to drop dead, one after the other after the other. Electronics got looted even though the power had gone out. Cannons fired, friends climbed over one another to get bonus coins, buildings burned; it had been utter chaos.

And then it had slowly begun to go disperse. The streets got quieter at night. Diddy recalled going out a week or so ago for a hotdog and a banana shake late at night, when he figured the looting might actually be at its worst (_damn _that appetite of his!). But what he had found out there, in the twisting alleyways beyond his mother's cheap little apartment, had been almost nothing at all. Except for the dead, he couldn't say for sure that he had seen anyone. It had been windy that night, and just a little cooler than it seemed it had been last year around this time. When at last he was scampering up to his favorite banana stand, it hit him that it might be deserted, too. And it was.

That was when the plague had finally begun to seem real to him. Not the night before, when his big brother Funky Kong had been lounging around the living room, telling everyone that the boredom was really starting to get to him. By that time his mother and father, bless their hearts, had bought into the hysteria and hired a crew of full time nurses for Funky. They swarmed around him in one giant, ever present cluster, constantly measuring temperatures, poking, prodding, insisting he eat this or that, try thinking about her, about him, et cetera, et cetera. Diddy watched in rising horror as his big bro thrashed about in the armchair, screaming. "I'm _bored! _Holy shit, I'm so motherfucking _bored!_"

"Son," Diddy's dad would say awkwardly, sometimes lifting an arm toward Funky's shoulder.

"No, dad!" Funky would shriek as he jerked away. "You don't get it! There's literally nothing to _do_!"

"Son, calm down…"

"Dad! Listen to me! I'm bored out of my fucking face! I don't think I can take this shit much longer!"

"Son! _Son_! Stop that! Keep your hands to yourself, young man. Don't you make fists at me. Would it help if we took you to Kremland for the day? Huh? Would that help you overcome this… terrible disease?"

"No, dad!" Funky had screamed furiously. "Kremland has the shittiest roller coasters ever! And they have the biggest wasp problem at that place! I _hate _Kremland!"

Funky got more and more bored, day after unbearable day, until eventually he had just sort of… dissolved. Diddy Kong awoke the morning after his unsuccessful visit to the banana stand to a somber house. He remembered trudging down the stairs, mentally preparing himself for another twelve hours of Funky Kong shrieking at the top of his lungs about how he had played all the enjoyment out of _every single one _of his dozens of video games. But when he came into the living room, he entered a scene in which his parents and the three nurses were all standing quietly around a small, sunken pile of ape fur draped over the recliner.

"He just… bored himself out of ex_istence_," one of the nurses remarked blandly.

"You know," Diddy's dad said, turning to Diddy's mom and yawning grandly, "I'm getting pretty bored myself."

"God, quit _talking _about it," the boys' mom cried. She clamped her long, slender fingers over her ears. "This is turning into the most boring day of my _life_."

Not long after the great plague of 1995, a condition people on the east coast of the island had been referring colloquially to as Captain Twix (due to the tendency for the afflicted to seek out Twix candy bars in a desperate, last-ditch effort to find something that even _tasted _halfway not-boring), Diddy Kong found himself standing alone in a deserted city.

He didn't like it. Not one single bit.

Sure, school was canceled. But without school, how the hell was he supposed to pick on those shiteating losers the Kremlings all day? He supposed he could just go swing through the jungle and throw cannonballs at random Kremling passersby, but that kind of petty intimidation had always kind of bored Diddy, and _now _was certainly not the time to start getting paranoid one's own boredom levels.

He decided to climb down the network of ghost ropes and well-timed bounces off of the heads of forest-dwelling nerds (that is to say, Kremlings), but since nearly all the Kremlings had been bored down to little clumps of bone and scale, Diddy simply pitched through the sky toward whatever lay below.

_Well, _Diddy thought grimly, _at least I won't be bored._


End file.
